Deeplinks Blog posts about Locational Privacy

On Wednesday, September 16, nine months into the 114th Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the federal law that regulates government access to private communications records stored by third parties.

Right now, the statute allows the government to obtain private messages that are older than 180 days—including web-based emails, social media messages, text messages, and voicemails—as well as private documents stored by “cloud” service providers like Dropbox, with an administrative subpoena. ECPA was first passed in 1986 before Congress could imagine the wealth of personal information that would be stored on third-party servers rather than private hard drives.

The Attorney General’s Office of New Jersey is on a crusade to dismantle the important search and seizure protections afforded to the state’s citizens. As part of the latest assault on individual rights to due process, in State v. Lunsford, the attorney general has asked the New Jersey Supreme Court to overrule its landmark decision from 1982 in State v. Hunt that requires law enforcement to acquire a warrant to obtain an individual’s telephone billing records.

At long last, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced a slew of much-needed policy changes regarding the use of cell-site simulators. Most importantly, starting today all federal law enforcement agencies—and all state and local agencies working with the federal government—will be required to obtain a search warrant supported by probable cause before they are allowed to use cell-site simulators. EFF welcomes these policy changes as long overdue.

EFF and the ACLU of Southern Californiaurged the California Supreme Court in San Francisco to review our lawsuit seeking access to a week’s worth of automated license plate data collected by the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s Departments. The California Court of Appeal last spring sided with the agencies and ruled that these data—gathered on about three million vehicles in Los Angeles every week—could be withheld as “records of law enforcement investigations.”